ABSTRACT
Josep Anselm Clavé inspired the creation of dozens of choral societies, convinced that singing with a group could become a tool of political and social change. The initiative was inscribed in the Cabetian-inspired federal republican project, a cooperative, progressive, socialist option that revealed the political tensions in the Spanish Kingdom at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. This chapter centers on the role taken on by the Catalan Cors de Clavé [Clavé’s Choral Societies]. In addition to learning to sing, young workers learned to publicly display new attitudes about the body, gender, age, and religious convictions. The model’s success was due in part to the continuity of functionalities: secular republican choral societies occupied the same space as the Ancien Régime’s religious brotherhoods. Mutual aid, male sociability, and a renewed class consciousness turned choral group members into new citizens. The Cors coincided with the invasion of the working classes in public entertainments, the opera, and recreational entities. The revolution of “popular” music generated a new musical taxonomy that, even today, gets it musical meaning from the social sphere. Music became one of the most potent instruments of identification of class and ideological group.
